Posts Tagged ‘yachts’

I have seen numerous stories gleefully hyping the fact that the Republicans are in disarray with multiple competing plans (at least they’ve HAD plans). But look what’s been happening to the Democrat Party behind the mainstream media Republican-attack-machine’s back:

With all of the spotlights on the high-stakes debt maneuverings by President Obama and Speaker John Boehner the last few days, few people noticed what Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders said:

“I think it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition.”

This is political treason 469 days before a presidential election. Yes, yes, this is just a crusty old New England independent for now, albeit one who caucuses loyally with Harry Reid’s Democratic posse.

But while most of the media focuses on Republican Boehner and the tea party pressures on him to raise the debt limit not one Liberty dime, Sanders’ mumblings are a useful reminder that hidden in the shadows of this left-handed presidency are militant progressives like Sanders who don’t want to cut one Liberty dime of non-Pentagon spending.

Using political forensics, notice any clues, perhaps telltale code words that reveal to whom he was really addressing his Monday message? Clearly, it wasn’t congressional Republicans — or Democrats, for that matter.

The nation’s top talker uttered 2,264* words in those remarks. He said “balanced approach” seven times, three times in a single paragraph.

That’s the giveaway. Obviously, David Plouffe and the incumbent’s strategists have been polling phrases for use in this ongoing debt duel, which is more about 2012 now than 2011. “Balanced approach” is no sweet talk for old Bernie or tea sippers on the other side.

Obama is running for the center already, aiming for the independents who played such a crucial role in his victorious coalition in 2008. They were the first to start abandoning the good ship Obama back in 2009 when all the ex-state senator could do was talk about healthcare, when jobs and the economy were the peoples’ priority.

Democrats lost the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s offices largely as a result of that and Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. And then came last November’s midterms when voters chose the approach of that historic pack of House-bound Republicans.

Republicans have their own poll problems in some areas. But even without an identified GOP presidential alternative, we’ve had a plethora of recent polls showing Obama’s fading job approval, especially on the economy.

Now, comes a new ABC News/Washington Post poll with a whole harvest of revelations, among them, strong indications that Obama’s liberal base is starting to crumble. Among the nuggets:

Despite those hundreds of billions of blown stimulus dollars and almost as many upturn promises from Joe Biden, 82% of Americans still say their job market is struggling. Ninety percent rate the economy negatively, including half who give it the worst rating of “poor.”

Are You Better Off Today Than Jan. 20, 2009?

A slim 15% claim to be “getting ahead financially,” half what it was in 2006. Fully 27% say they’re falling behind financially. That’s up 6 points since February.

A significant majority (54%) says they’ve been forced to change their lifestyle significantly as a result of the economic times — and 60% of them are angry, up from 44%.

To be sure, 30 months after he returned to home cooking, George W. Bush still gets majority blame for the economy.

But here’s the breaking news for wishful Democrats: George W. Bush isn’t running for anything but exercise.

“More than a third of Americans now believe that President Obama’s policies are hurting the economy, and confidence in his ability to create jobs is sharply eroding among his base,” the Post reports.

Strong support among liberal Democrats for Obama’s jobs record has plummeted 22 points from 53% down below a third. African Americans who believe the president’s measures helped the economy have plunged from 77% to barely half.

Obama’s overall job approval on the economy has slid below 40% for the first time, with 57% disapproving. And strong disapprovers outnumber approvers by better than two-to-one.

That’s the Los Angeles Times – getting close to full maximum überliberal. As the rabid left-wing, they are honor-bound to get in their shot that “It’s really all still Bush’s fault,” but the Democrat Party is in full meltdown.

Obama gave a particularly demagogic speech on Monday, July 25. He repeatedly called for class warfare taxation on the rich. Which was in marked (or should I say “Marxed”) contrast to Harry Reid’s outline for a plan which did not call for any tax increases.

In his White House speech tonight, President Obama renewed his call for a debt-ceiling impasse solution which requires “the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their breaks in the tax code and special deductions.” In other words, he wants tax increases, even though earlier in the day, he backed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s “plan” (using the term loosely, as explained here and here) which, according to two separate reports (USAT; ABC), includes no tax increases.

In other words, the President, from all appearances, changed his mind — again. Calling the President’s performance in the debt-ceiling matter during the past several weeks “Jello-like” would appear to be an insult to the referenced food product.

We’ve all heard of somebody talking out of both sides of their mouth. The question is just how many sides does Obama’s mouth have given all the different things he can be saying at the same time?

We absolutely cannot trust Democrats at this point. If they do not have a specific, concrete, absolutely binding plan, then walk away. Because they have every incentive to lie their way out of this jam and then welch on whatever deal they make. If Harry Reid says he will offer X trillion dollars in cuts, then force him to itemize out every single dime of those cuts and bind Congress to them before accepting his plan.

They did this to Reagan and they did it to Bush I. They promised that they would cut spending later if they got the tax cuts they wanted. And then the next Congress arrived and Bush and Reagan were told that no Congress could be bound by the promises of a previous Congress – even if the same Democrat leaders who had made those promises were still in power. And just how many times should Charlie Brown believe that Lucy will really hold the football for him this time?

Particularly when they are in a corner. And they are in a corner snarling like trapped rabid rats right now.

Republicans need to adhere to their basic values. They have already compromised in that 1) Barack Obama already got $500 billion in new taxes via his ObamaCare fiasco; and 2) in even offering a debt ceiling increase to begin with. In return, they want spending cuts that exceed the debt ceiling hike and they will not accept any new tax increases.

Meanwhile, Obama is back to the same utterly failed Marxist class warfare tactics that have failed before. In the 1990s, Democrats imposed a “luxury tax” on items such as yachts, believing that the wealthy “could afford it.” Maybe they could and maybe they couldn’t, but the FACT was that the rich STOPPED buying yachts. As in stopped completely. As in NOBODY bought a yacht with that damn tax on it. The Democrats finally rescinded that stupid tax two years later after destroying the yach building and yacht maintenance industries and killing over 100,000 jobs. Rich people weren’t hurt at all; ordinary people were devastated.

And now Obama wants to do the same thing with corporate jets that previous Democrts did to yachts. And they only people who will get hurt if Obama gets his way are the companies that hire people to build and maintain those jets and the workers themselves who will lose their jobs and their livelihoods. And the only thing that is stopping this rape of businesses, workers and the economy that depends on workers and businesses are Republicans.

I don’t feel the least bit sorry for Democrats who currently find themselves between a very hard rock and a very hard place. Their core principles are vile, they are despicable, and they simply have to be thrown out of office and crushed if our country is to have any chance whatsoever.

When I was a kid we had two dogs – a cagey wire-hair dachshund, and a typically elitist poodle.

Every single feeding was exactly the same. The dachshund would gobble down her food while the poodle stared at her bowl in haughty disdain.

Then, at some point right about the time when the dachshund had finished eating all the food in her bowl, the poodle would decide that surely the dachshund’s food must be better, and that she’d rather eat it.

So she would go over to the dachshund’s bowl, only alas, there was nothing in it.

Meanwhile, the dachshund would circle over to the poodle’s bowl, and glomb down that food, too.

We had to feed the dogs separately, or that poodle would have literally starved to death. Because as smart as that dog could be in some ways, she was dumb as a box of rocks when it came to common sense. And she just never learned.

Read the following and tell me if you don’t see a similarity between that poodle and the Democrat Party:

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is the latest Democrat to demand a tax increase, this week proposing to raise the state’s top marginal individual income tax rate to 4% from 3%. He’d better hope this works out better than it has for Maryland.

We reported in May that after passing a millionaire surtax nearly one-third of Maryland’s millionaires had gone missing, thus contributing to a decline in state revenues. The politicians in Annapolis had said they’d collect $106 million by raising its income tax rate on millionaire households to 6.25% from 4.75%. In cities like Baltimore and Bethesda, which apply add-on income taxes, the top tax rate with the surcharge now reaches as high as 9.3%—fifth highest in the nation. Liberals said this was based on incomplete data and that rich Marylanders hadn’t fled the state.

Well, the state comptroller’s office now has the final tax return data for 2008, the first year that the higher tax rates applied. The number of millionaire tax returns fell sharply to 5,529 from 7,898 in 2007, a 30% tumble. The taxes paid by rich filers fell by 22%, and instead of their payments increasing by $106 million, they fell by some $257 million. […]

A Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysis of federal tax return data on people who migrated from one state to another found that Maryland lost $1 billion of its net tax base in 2008 by residents moving to other states. That’s income that’s now being taxed and is financing services in Virginia, South Carolina and elsewhere. […]

Thanks in part to its soak-the-rich theology, Maryland still has a $2 billion deficit and Montgomery County is $760 million in the red. Governor Martin O’Malley’s office tells us he wants the higher rates to expire “as scheduled at the end of 2010.” But there are bills in both chambers of the legislature to extend the surcharge. The state’s best hope is that politicians in other states are as self-destructive as those in Annapolis.

I swear, you’d be better off putting my poodle in charge of food collection than you would be putting Democrats in charge of anything.

Starting in 1991, Washington levied a 10% luxury tax on cars valued above $30,000, boats above $100,000, jewelry and furs above $10,000 and private planes above $250,000. Democrats like Ted Kennedy and then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his “no new taxes” pledge.

But it wasn’t long before even these die-hard class warriors noticed they’d badly missed their mark. The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in Messrs. Mitchell and Kennedy’s home states of Maine and Massachusetts, was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77% drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000. With bipartisan support, all but the car tax was repealed in 1993, and in 1996 Congress voted to phase that out too. January 1 was disappearance day.

Over and over again, Democrats keep making the same mistake. They are continually amazed that they keep getting the same results. And then they fiercely insist that those results won’t apply the next time.

The Maryland “tax the rich” example has been demonstrated again and again.

Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) — New York State’s income tax revenue has dropped 36 percent from the same period in 2008, Governor David Paterson said, “frustrating” his attempt to close a projected $2.1 billion budget deficit.

“We added personal income tax, which we thought would make the falloff 10 percent to 15 percent,” Paterson, a Democrat, said on CNBC today, referring to $5.2 billion in new or increased taxes. “This is what is so frustrating. It’s still 36 percent, meaning our revenues fell more in 2009 than they did in 2008.”

Charging that it’s “easy to rile against the rich,” Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday that theincome-tax increases being considered for the wealthiest New Yorkers would drive them from the city.

“One percent of the households that file in this city pay something like 50 percent of the taxes. In the city, that’s something like 40,000 people. If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral,” the billionaire mayor said on his weekly radio show.

“The question is what’s fair. If 1 percent are paying 50 percent of the taxes, you want to make it even more? Anybody below that 1 percent, no taxes?”

Legislators in Albany are considering state income-tax hikes for households earning from $250,000 to $1 million to close a budget gap next year of at least $13 billion.

Don’t look now, but there’s a new War Between the States under way, and the south is winning. The most dramatic winner is Texas. The cover story of a recent (July 9) issue of The Economist compared California with Texas and implied that the Golden State is falling apart, while the Lone Star State is leading the nation out of the recession. Then, in a mid-July issue of National Review, Kevin D. Williamson said the nation is “Going Alamo,” with new jobs and businesses tipping southward, draining California, the Midwest, and Northeast of their former economic glory.

One indicator of the trend, according to Williamson, is the cost of renting a U-Haul truck for a one-way move. From Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California, the cost is $900, while a one-way rental from San Francisco to Austin is $3,000, due to the exodus of trucks from California.

All this makes sense. We are a mobile nation. People can move easily enough (especially if they rent), and capital can move even faster. Capital, jobs, and businesses will go where they are most welcome, while capital leaves places where it is punished by higher taxes and over-regulation.

And lo and behold, Texas, with its low taxes, has created 70% of all US jobs since 2008. But liberals don’t want job creation, for all their bogus rhetoric; they want Marxism. They want class warfare. They want redistributionism. They want to “spread the wealth around.” No matter how ruinous it is. And no matter how badly it hurts the little people, who keep falling for class warfare demagoguery the way Charlie Brown keeps falling for Lucy’s promise to hold the football for him.

In spite of being warned that liberal class-warfare tax-the-rich-to-extinction policies would lead to Dodo-bird results, New York attacked the rich with a 31% income tax hike. And all they have to show for their eat-the-rich tax policies is record revenue shortfalls.

And how do Democrats react? Do they acknowledge proven, factual, repeatedly-documented reality? They don’t have it in them, anymore than my idiot poodle had it in her. Rather, they insist on performing the same failed experiment again in Illinois. And all that’s going to happen is that the rich will move or shelter their money, such that an even bigger tax burden ends up falling on the working class whom Democrats fallaciously claim to be helping.

And as foolish, as idiotic, as suicidal as putting Democrats in charge of a state is, the only thing worse is to put them in charge of the federal government.

Democrats were so determined to impose tax hikes on the rich that they are willing to ensure that NOBODY gets any tax cuts. The bi-partisan compromise vote was all on the Republicans’ side. And Democrats were afraid to allow a straight up-or-down vote on allowing tax cuts for all Americans. They preferred huge tax hikes for Americans, instead.

You can paint string yellow and sell it to these people as gold. And then you can do it again, and again, and again.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said Wednesday. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

Obama on May 4 proposed outlawing or restricting about $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Such business groups as the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have denounced the proposed overhaul.

U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.

Starting in 1991, Washington levied a 10% luxury tax on cars valued above $30,000, boats above $100,000, jewelry and furs above $10,000 and private planes above $250,000. Democrats like Ted Kennedy and then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell crowed publicly about how the rich would finally be paying their fair share and privately about convincing President George H.W. Bush to renounce his “no new taxes” pledge.

But it wasn’t long before even these die-hard class warriors noticed they’d badly missed their mark. The taxes took in $97 million less in their first year than had been projected — for the simple reason that people were buying a lot fewer of these goods. Boat building, a key industry in Messrs. Mitchell and Kennedy’s home states of Maine and Massachusetts, was particularly hard hit. Yacht retailers reported a 77% drop in sales that year, while boat builders estimated layoffs at 25,000. With bipartisan support, all but the car tax was repealed in 1993, and in 1996 Congress voted to phase that out too. January 1 was disappearance day.

But liberals have to learn the same basic lesson over and over again (which is another way of saying liberals never learn).

Only a fool thinks you get more of something by taxing it. Only a fool thinks that people won’t change their behavior in order to avoid paying higher taxes.

Barack Obama can fix everything just by taxing the rich. He can massively increase social spending simply by taxing the bejeebers of the evil and greedy rich. You CAN eat your cake and have it too!!!

There’s only one thing wrong (apart from the whole Marxist class warfare thing) with his plan:

Obama foolishly believes that raising taxes on the rich will be a panacea so that he can engage in all kinds of massive social programs (to the tune of $874 billion in new spending). He plans to raise $100 billion by increasing taxes on the rich. What he doesn’t understand is that the rich will change their behavior, begin sheltering their money, and suddenly government will see its stockpile of golden eggs shrink, and keep shrinking. Obama is counting on the rich acting exactly as they have been acting as a result of the Bush tax cuts. But he simply doesn’t understand that that isn’t the way real life actually works.

In today’s paper there was an Associated Press article discussing the federal budget deficit that contained the following statement on taxes vis-à-vis revenues.

McCain promises to renew the full roster of Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 and add many more for businesses and upper income people who pay the alternative minimum tax. The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2010 and renewing them would soon cost well over $200 billion a year. Eliminating the alternative minimum at the same time would cost almost as much.

The sentence “The Bush tax cuts expire at the end of 2010 and renewing them would soon cost well over $200 billion a year” is completely true – if human beings are simply robot idiots. It’s completely false if people react to changing environmental conditions by changing their behavior. The thing is that people AREN’T robot idiots and they DO change their behavior to avoid negatives and take advantage of positives.

Think of the recent high gas prices. Americans have overwhelmingly altered their behavior as a result of the high gas prices, driving nearly 10 billion fewer miles compared to last year. As the price of gas became more and more expensive, Americans reacted by altering their behavior. And if the price of gas goes back down, people will respond by increasing their driving.

And the rich do the same thing. They react to high taxes by sheltering their money, and they react to lower taxes by increasing their investments and growing their business.

The easiest example of this is the luxury tax that Democrats stupidly applied to items like yachts some years back. They saw only the additional revenue they would obtain by “soaking the rich,” but the rich – faced with a 10% additional tax – simply stopped buying yachts and the result nearly destroyed the boating industry. You don’t get rich by being stupid with money. But Democrats think entirely in class-warfare terms, and are simply incapable of learning this lesson.

What liberals – both in politics and in the media – do is look at the tax revenues, put in the higher tax rates they prefer, and calculate that they would make X.XX% more if the tax rate were higher. But that’s simply false, and it has been factually and historically proven false.

The Bush tax cuts produced higher than projected revenue – to the tune of a 35% growth between 2003 and 2006. In comparison, during the height of the Clinton economy between 1997 and 2000 – when he didn’t have 9/11 (and the subsequent hit to the economy) and we didn’t have wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragging us down, federal receipts still rose only 28.2%.

The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.

Most of the increase in individual tax receipts appears to have come from higher stock market gains and the business income of relatively wealthy taxpayers. The biggest jump was not from taxes withheld from salaries but from quarterly payments on investment gains and business earnings, which were up 20 percent this year.

A Treasury Department analysis found that the tax cuts prompted the creation of jobs and increased the gross domestic product. It points out that:

Lower tax rates enable workers to keep more of their earnings, which increases work effort and labor force participation. The lower tax rates also enable innovative and risk-taking entrepreneurs to keep more of what they earn, which further encourages their entrepreneurial activity. The lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains lower the cost of equity capital and reduce the tax biases against dividend payment, equity finance, and investment in the corporate sector. All of these policies increase incentives to work, save, and invest by reducing the distorting effects of taxes. Capital investment and labor productivity will thus be higher, which means higher output and living standards in the long run.

Prior to the Reagan Revolution in 1981, the top marginal federal income tax rate was 70% (it is currently 35% under President Bush). At the 70% rate, the top 1% paid only 19% of the federal income tax burden, and the top 5% paid 37%. With the tax rate cut in half, the top 1% are paying more than twice as much of the total tax burden – nearly 40% – and the top 5% are paying nearly 60%.